Relationships, especially romantic relationships, play a very important role in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. When reading Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, you will notice that there appears to be a behavioral pattern in the relationships between Gatsby and Daisy, Daisy and Tom, and Nick and Jordan. As I explain in this article, these relationships suffer from the fear of intimacy, the fear of the inevitable mutual emotional pain that occurs when human beings grow close to each other. For the sake of clarity, let's first take a closer look at the theory that humans cannot get close without harming each other, the theory known as the "hedgehog dilemma." The concept of the hedgehog's dilemma was first introduced by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. . Schopenhauer proposed the idea that human intimacy works the same way hedgehogs huddle together for warmth: the closer they get to each other the more they hurt each other. While hedgehogs physically hurt each other with their quills due to their close physical proximity, humans emotionally hurt each other when they reach a certain degree of emotional closeness. Because of our fear of emotional devastation, we often develop a fear of intimacy. Schopenhauer's theory gained even wider visibility after Sigmund Freud introduced it to the study of psychology in the early 1900s, giving it the name by which it is now commonly known. Tom and Daisy Buchanan's marriage is undoubtedly the most tumultuous relationship within the novel. Tom spends his time with two different women, both his wife Daisy and a lover named Myrtle Wilson. Tom's division of time between the two allows him to refrain from achieving any significant level of emotional intimacy with either with... half the paper... at least "half in love with her" (177). Nick's actions during and after he and Jordan's separation suggest that he is trying to repress and avoid memories of her that could harm him. He states that he doesn't "know which one of us hung up on the phone, but [he] knows [he didn't care]" after the phone call that officially ends their relationship, and later during an in-person conversation with Jordan, “we talked over and over again about what had happened to us together” (155, 177). Of all the characters in the novel, it is possible that Jordan Baker is the only one to directly face the fear that plagues them all. Certainly this is what he is implying in his final conversation with Nick, stating: “You said a bad driver was only safe until he met a bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I?" Bad drivers, in this case, are those who are afraid of intimacy (177).